Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

REFLECTIONS OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE
Children’s folklore scholarship began in the nineteenth century, when indus-
trial growth made people think about children’s expressive behavior. The first 
Industrial Revolution, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, 
inspired Europe’s Romantic movement, which idealized childhood in the context 
of rural life, nature, and emotion. The second Industrial Revolution, from 1865 
to the 1890s, involved massive growth in American industry and finance, with 
fast-growing railroads and increasing ethnic diversity through immigration. In 
his poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” William Wordsworth states, 
“The child is father of the man”: an often-quoted line that represents nineteenth-
century intellectuals’ concept of children as visionaries and leaders. Alexander 
Chamberlain, who edited the 
Journal of American Folklore
from 1900 to 1907, 
suggests that people profit enormously from “[childhood’s] wisdom, its naiveté, 
its ingenuity, and its touch of divinity” (403).
The first folklorists of childhood, including Alexander Chamberlain, William 
Wells Newell, and Lady Alice Bertha Gomme, followed an evolutionary ap-
proach, viewing children as preservers of earlier culture and developers of creative 
variations. These evolution-oriented scholars believed that society moved forward 
through three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. According to this ap-
proach, adults maintained current civilization, but children reflected civilization’s 
earlier achievements. In his book 
Folklife Studies from the Gilded Age,
Simon J. 
Bronner articulates the close relationship between early children’s folklore stud-
ies and the focus on progress and rationality of the late nineteenth century’s 
Gilded Age (119–34). Bronner’s essay “Expressing and Creating Ourselves in 
Childhood” aptly compares children’s folklore studies of the Gilded Age with 
contemporary children’s folklore scholarship: “As Chamberlain and Newell used 
folklore research to reflect on the hierarchical industrial age rising in their Gilded 
Age society, so the trend today is to contemplate the swirling social currents of an 
electronic era. More than an objective anthropological endeavor envisioned by 
Chamberlain, the ethnographic task now is broadly interdisciplinary and simul-
taneously involves us as participants and observers” (55). Although evolutionary 
analysis of children’s folklore has become a fossil in the archives of early scholar-
ship, rapid social and economic change still causes excitement and concern.
After the first flowering of children’s folklore scholarship in the late nineteenth 
century, studies of children’s games, songs, and other traditions became sporadic. 
The upheavals of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression of the 1930s 

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Introduction 7
did not encourage contemplation of children’s expressive culture. There were, 
however, some important contributions to children’s folklore study, including 
Norman Douglas’s 
London Street Games
(1916/1931) and Edward Norton’s 
Play 
Streets
(1937). Some post–World War II studies record rhymes and observations 
of play from earlier years. In their admirably thorough 
Children’s Games in Street 
and Playground,
Iona and Peter Opie note that children incarcerated at Auschwitz 
during World War II played imaginative games based on the tragic events that 
they witnessed (331). The Opies include a number of topical rhymes from 1929 
to 1958 in their canonical 
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
(1959), including 
songs with the first lines “Kaiser Bill went up the hill,” “Roll along Mussolini, roll 
along,” “In 1941 old Hitler ate a bun,” and “Catch a falling sputnik” (98–106).
From the late 1950s to the present, scholars have kept extensive records of 
children’s folklore. The many publications of play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith 
have documented children’s expressive behavior in the context of social change. 
His book